In the new David Hare play specially written for television, Page Eight (BBC Two), Bill Nighy was on top form. “I’ve got,” he said “a question”. The two parts of the sentence were so thoroughly separated that they might have been two sentences in the script. They certainly were by the time Nighy finished with them. Or maybe it was Michael Gambon. My notes got a bit confused as I tried to field some of the fragments.

Statistical analysis proves that only half of the verbal shrapnel I noted down could have come from Gambon, because the character he was playing died from an incorrectly cooked egg half way through the show, leaving the attention fully focused on Nighy. I like him too, but is a nation physically well when its leading male sexpot, the one that the brilliant young ladies half his age all want to have a piece of, looks quite so fine drawn? Or as he himself might put it, “Fine. Drawn.”

In the role of Johnny Worricker, someone high up in the British security services, Nighy was playing someone under so much pressure that thin flatness, if not fine drawnness, always threatened. Worricker had noticed something written on Page Eight of the Secret Report. Was it something about 39 Steps? No, that was happening elsewhere, in a rerun of the BBC’s 2008 television adaptation offering no remarkable difference from Hitchcock’s classic version except that the beautiful young woman was played by Lydia Leonard instead of Madeleine Carroll and instead of spending half the movie shackled to the hero she now spent no time at all shackled to him because getting out of handcuffs was something she was good at. She was so good at everything that she, and not Richard Hannay, might as well have been the British agent.

In the end it turned out that she was; this revelation arriving just in time for her to be shot, in a setting reminiscent of the last scene in the movie Enigma. Except that it wasn’t the last scene. She came back so that we could have another look at her and do a bit more wondering why we don’t hear more about Lydia Leonard: so light, witty and pretty. But there has to be a script: there has to be something worth getting by heart.

Such was almost true of Rachel Weisz in Page Eight. Conveying a very plausible crush on Worricker – a danger man who collects art, what’s not to like? – she generated something of the zing she gave Enemy at the Gates when she was fighting the Wehrmacht. This was a kind of war as well, with the women running the same chance as the men of getting wiped out by a fried egg. Even when the headliners, by the subtraction of Michael Gambon, had been reduced to two, she was still clearly a plus factor in a project of high interest. But didn’t that fine movie Defence of the Realm turn on the same premise, whereby the intelligence service does what it must to serve the government while the government is doing what it thinks necessary to serve the Americans?

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By now it’s practically a standard story, and it was interesting to note that the Israelis were dragged in as automatic villains. There was a time when a few words on their behalf would have had to be included, but by now no argument needs to be made against them: rhetoric will do fine.

And really this play was all rhetoric, was it not? Worricker’s detached murmur was a way of saying that not much could be done about the underlying chicanery except expose it for what it is, a power play by the Americans in which Downing Street is acquiescent, misleading its own Home Office. To lend more dramatic weight to this framework, the Tony Blair figure is given an American-style gift of tough-guy eloquence. If only. Or as Bill Nighy might say it while practising in front of his bathroom mirror, “If” and “Only”.

So Worricker does his bit for the country’s mental health by putting the story out. The script takes it for granted that by this lone stance in the service of his nation – an almost forgotten spirit of loyalty which we are led to think he inherited from Gambon, who was actually a man of principle until his cholesterol count did him in – Worricker has defied the real powers that be. His life will therefore be forfeit. Four. Feet. At least twice that tall in the adoring Rachel’s eyes, he vanishes, perhaps in the direction of a sequel, which might even turn into a series, if those speculators are right who see here a return to the good old Cold War days of John Le Carré’s middle-period books, from which screenplays were made that allowed Sir Alec Guinness to re-interpret eternity in terms of a knowing half-smile.

If David Hare does indeed have more Worricker adventures in mind – there’s something Sharpe about Worricker’s moniker, don’t you find? – I will be glad to watch, although I doubt if the level could ever climb to match that of the TV event that was his play’s clearest ancestor, State of Play. Bill Nighy was in that one too, playing a newspaper editor who was smarter than the spies. In fact, come to think of it, if you scrambled Defence of the Realm with State of Play you would get Page Eight.

But when it comes to the media, total originality is the wrong thing to wish for. It’s not just that most of the stories were discovered long ago, although they were: it’s that any new story so rapidly becomes a taking-off point for something more subtle that you would never notice the true original if it had not also become the template of so many things less subtle.

The originality that matters goes on between the plot lines, as it were. Catherine Cookson, who died at 91 with at least that many books to her credit and so much money that the generous charitable foundations she established will never finish giving it away, is much patronised by those who watch high-level period dramas. But when you actually take a look at a chapter or two of a Cookson television serial, it’s not really that much worse than one of those classical adaptations which would not be up to much without their décor and cast list. In the Cookson you have to put up with storylines like country miles of mud while good-hearted foundling Totty Goodheart is palmed off on the chubby butcher – a breakout role for Northern comedian Chubby Butcher – but the dialogue, in its moral detailing, is not really all that far behind what you hear from the adapter of your average Austen-Brontë, who, for sayability and turn of phrase, is not all that far behind the inventor of Johnny Worricker.

Fairly soon, I imagine, David Hare, under the pressure of this latest success, will have to contemplate the return of his suavely knackered hero. Who better to lead MI5 than the man who best knows its ins and outs? Its ins. And its outs. Arise, Sir Johnny Worricker.